Blending skeletons

Octodoctor

I have 2 skeletons with approximately the same bone hierarchy and one set of animations (The second skeleton contains a revised version of the animations, this is a working version). The task is to transfer the skin from one skeleton to another (Skin animations must be saved). Is there some easy way to do this?

Octodoctor

Erika

Hello, is the goal to have both skins inside the same skeleton, using the same set of bones, and animations?

If so, this is doable, but it requires some work.
The steps are, summarized:

Import the bones missing from one skeleton into the other, if there's any
Recreate manually any missing constraint
Import the images in the same skeleton, possibly retaining the meshes
import the animations that are missing

Start by importing the less advanced skeleton into the latest and most definitive Spine project, so that you have both skeletons in it.

We'll check for bones first: begin by matching the bones names perfectly for most of the bones you can. This will ensure meshes and animations can be imported with less work.

Make a copy of the less advanced skeleton and keep the other as a backup, because we are going to move the bones that are missing through drag-and-drop from one skeleton to the other.

If it's several bones with children, select just the parent ones. If slots are parented to these bones, do these steps:

select the skin in the old skeleton and make sure it is active
create a new skin in the new skeleton with the same name of the old one and make sure it is active
if the images are meshes, check to which bones they are bound: to not lose the weights the receiving skeleton must have bones named the same as the old skeleton if they are not being moved with the parent bone you want to move.

Recreate any constraints that may have been lost during the moving of bones.

Move the rest of the images making sure to follow the steps illustrated above.

Finally, choose import project, choose your current project, and to import the animations from the backup skeleton to the new skeleton.

This should more or less work even if the bones don't match perfectly. Consider adding skin bones for extra bones: Skins - Spine User Guide: Skin bones
Consider adding skin constraints if some images really require a different angle or position:
Skins - Spine User Guide: Skin constraints
Blog: Skin constraints for different proportions
Depending on how different you need the bones to be positioned, you may need to redo some weights. I can explain this in more detail if necessary.

This should do the trick! Let me know how it goes.

Octodoctor

Thanks a lot, it works!